| Long abstract |
Following the French historian and philosopher Michel Fou-cault, contemporary queer scholars frequently maintain that sexuality is a product of discourse. At its most basic, discoursemeans speech, but for Foucault (1972) discourse is “the gener-al domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualisable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements” (80). In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault (1990a) frames the relationship between sexuality and discourse in this way: sexuality is “the correlative of that slowly developed discursive practice which constitutes the scientia sexualis” (68)—the Western “regulated practice” of classifying, monitoring, and disciplining individu-als based on what Freud would call their choice of sexual objects or the directions of their sexual aims. The scientia sexualis has its roots in the Catholic practice of confession, which from the Middle Ages enjoined people to speak about sex in extraordinary detail, to seek out “all insinuations of the flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined move-ments of the body and soul” (19). In the nineteenth and twenti-eth centuries, psychiatry and psychoanalysis contributed to the secular appropriation of the church’s insistence that each person transform his or her sex into discourse. As Foucault wryly notes, “Ours is, after all, the only civilization in which individuals are paid to listen to all and sundry impart the secrets of their sex: as if the urge to talk about it, and the interest one hopes to arouse by doing so, have far surpassed the possibilities of being heard, so that some individuals have even offered their ears for hire”
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